The purpose of brand management is to guide the investments of affect on the part of consumers (or other subjects). This is true regardless of whether the brand refers to a consumer good, and organization or a political movement or party- or some combination of the above. In any case it is a matter of creating an affective intensity, an experience of unity between the brand and the subject. Brand management is about making the becoming of subjects and the becoming of value coincide. As in other instances where the creation of value is based on investments of affect, this process proceeds through the agency of subjects: it is an interactive process. This way, the difference between brand management and Fordist advertising can be captured well by the distinction between ‘discipline’ and ‘interactivity’ as general paradigms of governance, set up by Andew Barry.

Discipline, Barry argues, provides a time-table: like the Fordist consumption norm constructed by means of advertising it works by prescribing particular times and places for particular activities. Brand management rather depends on the choice of the user as to the time, space or generally modality of interaction with the brand. Discipline, like the Fordist consumption norm depends on the ‘correlation of the body and the gesture’ the creation of a subject that is able to focus on one particular pursuit, concentrate on the task at hand. Brand management presupposes ‘an orientation of creative capacity’ it ‘depends on the potential of the undisciplined body and the unfocused mind’ its ability to multi-task, move about in a complex environment and produce unexpected results. Discipline, like the Fordist consumption norm, produces enduring subjectivities, ‘roles’ through rules and codes that persist in time. Interactive brand management relies on the constitution of brief interaction and the maximization of their value. Discipline, like Fordist advertising relies on the authority of experts. In brand management ‘the authority of the expert is partly hidden I order to maximize the possibilities for interaction’. Discipline says Learn ! You Must! Brand Management: Discover! You May

Brand Value

One could claim that the difficulties in measuring brand values are linked to the properties of what is measured. It is difficult to measure subjective attachments like attention or affect. This might be true to some extent, but the history of market and audience research shows that capital has had little problems in finding valid ways to measure and valorize these things. The culture industries have for a long time based the valorization of their products upon a measure of the value of viewer attention, mostly in terms of number (and sometimes kinds of) people watching and viewing time. That way the value of a 30 second commercial on prime time could be established as against the value of a 45 second commercial in the afternoon. What has vanished is rather the very possibility of using time as a measure. This proposes that the problem of measure that comes to the fore in brand valuation is political, rather than ontological.

To Marxist economics, value is not a substance, but a relation. Two things become valuable if they are put in a relation of exchangeability- united by a common measure, so to say. Now, to valorize; to enable the production of use values to generate surplus value, means primarily to establish a relation of exchangeability. In this sense, the ‘law of value’ is not only a term for the prevailing relations of exchange: it is the very foundation for capitalist command of the social. For a long time, the law of value has established labour time as the measure. Things have been exchangeable according to some (mostly very abstract) idea of the amount of abstract labour (time) needed for their production. This measure can be said to have had a ‘natural’ foundations in 19^th century capitalism, to the extent that it could be said to be enforced by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. But labour time as a measure becomes problematic already within industrial capitalism. This is because the real subsumtion of labour- its inclusion into a factory or even system wide production process- means that labour itself tends to become all the more complex. It relies on and puts to work the social relations and communicative networks- the forms of cooperation- that prevail within the factory environment. This means that the productivity of labour is increasingly derived from things like cooperation, communication and General Intellect that are immanent to the productive environment itself, and do not have their ontological foundation in any external reality that can be invoked as a measure. That way labour time looses its relevance as a measure.

As Marx describes the consequences of these development sin the Grundrisse: ‘as soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be] the measure of use value’. The Fordist project can be understood as a reaction against this ‘crisis of value’. The state steps in and guarantees a politically enforced law of value, which establishes the exchangeability between elements as if they were measurable in terms of labour time. The assignment of ‘values’ is arbitrary already here: The labour of male factory workers is given high values, that of female housewives practically no value. But brand management has to face a situation where capital no longer commands the productivity of the social, not even through the state apparatus. The productivity of the networked multitude evolves beyond the command of capital, and therefore also beyond any measure. This way, the instability of measure corresponds to a real separation between production and valorization, and hence a general weakness of capitalist command.

Brands are a capitalist response to the hypermediatization of the social that prevails in informational capitalism. This has not only entailed a fusion of the aesthetic and the economic, of media and reality, of the attention economy and the industrial economy. It has also created the conditions for a real productive autonomy on the part of the inhabitants of this hypermediated world, the networked multitude. Within the forms of immaterial production that the multitude employs (the production of life, of knowledge, of social organization), there is a real possibility for the autonomous production of a common world. It is this surplus that can produce a common that makes up the intrinsic political potential of the multitude: its ability to transcend (or better perhaps ‘sidestep’) the present and construct a different world, from below. This is not a utopian prospect. The multitude engages in such practices of ‘transformative virtuality’ everyday, in communicative, immaterial production processes, ‘a different world’ becomes not only possible, but is produced and concretely realized all the time (on the internet, in the self-organizing team, in the third world slum.

Brand management also feeds of this surplus. It is the possibility of consumers to create something new, their ability to produce what I have called an ethical surplus that is the substance of brand values. The purpose of brand management is to program the productive potential of the networked multitude so that it evolves in particular and desirable directions: on the preferred and desirable plane of the brand where all qualities are compatible and the real world is filtered out. It is coherent with this logic of power that the creation of alternative forms of communality are clamped down upon if they are too successful, as in the case of the British 1990s Rave scene, the Italian occupied houses or recent file sharing communities. (As well as right wing and religious – Christian or Muslim- fundamentalism. Not all of these forms of communality are benign from a western middle class point of view.) This way brand management can be understood as a vanguard form of capitalist governance. It recognizes and seeks to benefit from the most advanced forms of negation of the capitalist order: the productive autonomy of the social that is at the same time a political and an economic force. But at the same time, the separation of production from valorization that this entails is a sign of the weakness of capitalist command. There, as in many other instances of immaterial production (sustainable energy solutions, medical research, the provision of basic service for the poor etc.) capitalist command goes against and acts as an obstacle for the development of the productive forces of the social. The forces of production are becoming to advanced to be contained within capitalist relations of production. Perhaps the contradicion that the brand embodies, between increased dependency on the productivity of the social, and a reduced ability to command that productivity is indicative of a general crisis of informational capitalism.